Explorations in Technology, Productivity and Life

Category Archives: Google

One of the great things about Google+ is the ability to join various communities and share with others that are of a similar mindset. Of course, over time, your interests change and you may want to prune your list of communities so that it only includes those you are interested in.

So how do you leave a community?

1. From your computer click on the Home button in the upper left hand corner of your browser and select Communities.

2. Select the community you wish to leave.

3. Click on the gear icon and select ‘Leave community’

4. Confirm you want to leave the community. Remember you’re only leaving the community the posts you’ve made in the system will still be visible – unless you delete them yourself

Now it is possible to leave a community from a mobile device but I’ve found it’s just much easier and quicker to handle it from the computer.

If you’re like me you have a multitude of email addresses, some you use for personal items, some for work, some for specific groups, and, well, you get the picture. You also most likely have put them into different contact groups to make emailing them easier – I’ve done just that but the trick that eludes many is how to set the email address for a given contact group. Here’s how.

Head over to your contact screen – its available from the Mail drop down

Select the contact you want to edit (I selected my own contact entry)

Select the contract group you want to adjust the email address for and select the appropriate one.

The changes you make are automatically saved and you’ve just made your friend or associate happy by making sure the emails you send to that group go to the right email address.

So you created a Google+ Page for your group or maybe that website you want to promote and now that things are moving along you realize that you can’t do it all yourself – you need help. So you think about having someone help you out and then you realize that the page you need help with is connected to your personal Google+ account and you don’t want to give your login information to someone else (and who can blame you) so what do you do?

You add a page manager, or two, of 50 (that’s the limit).

What can a page manager do? They can do everything you can as the owner of the page with two exceptions. First, they can’t delete the page, and second, they can’t change the ownership of it. They can however invite and remove others from the manager list so you might want to be careful as to who you make a manager of your page. (There’s a break down chart at this Google help page.)

First things first, navigate to your page and in the upper right hand corner click the gear symbol and select, Google+ settings.

When the setting screen loads you’ll want to select the “Managers” option that will be seen on the left hand side of the screen.

Now you’ll invite your page manager by entering their email address into the invitation box you’ll see in the middle of your screen and click invite.

After you click invite an email will be sent to the individual you want to be a manager for your page. It will look something similar to what you see below.

They need to click on the “Become a manager” link and then they’ll need to accept the pages terms and agree that they are authorized to manage the page (check the box) and hit accept. (Note: If they are logged into more than one Google account they will be asked which account they want to accept the invitation as.)

Once they’ve accepted the invite they will be shown in the Manager’s List which appears right above the invitation box.

That’s all there is to adding a manager to your page. If for some reason you decide that you no longer wish to have the person manage your page simply click the ‘x’ at the far right of the line and they will be removed as a manager and will receive an email stating that.

Hope that helps and gives you a bit more time to enjoy Google+ and less time managing things.

If you’re like me you made the attempt to get into Google’s Cr-48 program when they first announced it. They had 60,000 of those notebooks to hand out and if you really are like me, you didn’t get on.

All is not lost however as it would appear that there is another round of chances for those that would like to fill out the forms again. The folks at Google in conjunction with Box.net, Zoho and a few others are giving users of those online services a chance at getting a Chrome notebook.

The last few weeks have been pretty thin around here for postings and the main cause for that is I actually took a vacation. So I spent the first part of August getting the desk at my current employer cleared off (not an easy task when my boss took the first two weeks of August off) and then moved the family into a new home – which leaves little time for my online pursuits.

Well, now it’s time to get back into the swing of things and as I’ve started plowing through the hundreds of emails and RSS articles the notification that Gmail’s Priority Inbox was available to me to try out popped up in my tool bar. Let me say if you have not checked out this new feature you should – it’s a great tool.

Here’s a short video from the folks at Google to explain it:

The default settings work quite well and for most folks will work just fine but I have a tendency to let some things sit – they don’t need a response or action any time soon but I don’t want to archive them into oblivion so they sit in my inbox and eventually get buried. I know, I know, that’s not very GTD like but hey, we all fall off the bandwagon once in a while (ok, I’m about 50/50 – but I’m improving). So in order to work through the huge backlog I have it sift things just a bit by making a small change in the section set up:

I added a section that gives me just the unread items in my inbox, 10 at at time. This allows me to work through the backlog I have without seeing all the read items that need me to make some decision on at the top of my reading list. I know that it is better to take action on an item immediately so that you can get it off your mind but I trust that I’ll get back to the item eventually (it’s not critical or important otherwise I would do it) so it can sit in my inbox – I just don’t need to be constantly reminded of them as I work through everything else.